[VPS OpenVZ] FsckVPS from BlueSquare

Title: [VPS OpenVZ] FsckVPS
Provider: BlueSquare

Transfer: 1.5Tb/month Currency: US$

Setup: 0.00 (ex VAT) Monthly Cost: 34.90 (ex VAT) [In Euros: €Formatting error In US Dollars: $Formatting error]

Detailed Notes:

Disclaimer: We make use of VAServ VPSs ourselves

BlueSquare is the new owner of the famous VAServ VPS company which provides fsckvps.com, cheapvps.co.uk and others. In early summer 2009 VAServ suffered a massive outage which lost them more than half of their VPSs including all their user's data, and as they were facing bankruptcy they were bought out. Up until the outage, VAServ were one of the largest cheap VPS providers with maybe 200,000 servers provided - now, who knows but it is likely a lot smaller.

Considering this bad history, why are we ourselves at lowenddedi.net still using them? Well firstly they are not badly run for their price - they do well at balancing the overselling of their VPSs without being dicks about it, and their customer service is okay. Secondly we believe that they have learned from their mistakes - that they did not sufficiently scale their internal management processes to account for extreme growth, and that their upcoming harmonisation of all their offerings on just one virtualisation solution and one newly designed centralised management system will be a major step forwards. Thirdly, for their low, low price I personally thought that they handled the outage fairly well considering though I wish they'd stop fobbing me off with ill informed helpdesk monkeys who tell you a pack of alarming lies cos they don't have a clue what's going on (or how computers work for that matter).

That said we don't run anything critical on them. We only use them for satellite geolocalised load balancing purposes. If they vanished tomorrow it causes us no issue as our cluster automatically adapts.

World Connectivity:

The Los Angeles site is best for the entire Pacific and South East Asian region whereas the Texas site is probably best on average internationally.

Pros:

Apart from the VAServ outage, they have been a good solid VPS provider as a very affordable price. They oversell their VPSs intelligently and dynamically balance heavy users with light users such that most of the time you won't see them do it. They guarantee a minimum of 2.4Ghz which is one CPU core or 600Mhz per core.

If you need more horsepower than a dedi, you probably won't find 2.4Ghz of Core2 goodness cheaper elsewhere.

Cons:

You never ever want a workload that randomly alternates between full CPU and idle on a VPS. It confuses their load balancing automated systems. Also never run anything dependant on hard drive read latency on a VPS - make use of the tmpfs filing system on Linux where appropriate.

If you need lots of disc space then this isn't for you.

Verdict:

So long as you have a well configured haproxy that delegates on the basis of server congestion, I personally have found no reason why a high end VPS isn't an excellent worker slave in an overall server cluster.